The value of female sports audiences

We focused on three advertising ‘truisms’ to show how the latest data from Comscore altered traditional understandings about advertising and brand audiences.

1. Men are the best audience for sports advertising
2. High-income consumers in their 50s are the best audience for luxury brands
3. We can generalize different generations

In this blog series we’ll focus on each of the truisms in more detail starting with audiences for sports advertising. Read the full report for more detail.

Traditionally when advertisers are thinking about the audience for sports they often think of men. Whilst it is true that men do make up the majority of sporting event audiences, it is important for advertisers to dig deeper into the available data to make sure they aren’t missing out on an important target segment.

Men make up the largest segment of sports audiences, for example 66% of FIFA’s UK YouTube audience during the 2018 World Cup was male. However, when it comes to sports, female audiences might be smaller, but they are in fact much more engaged. Just one example of that is that the average British female viewer watched 77% more FIFA YouTube videos than her male counterpart during the 2018 World Cup. With the link between repeat exposure and ad effectiveness, targeting a highly engaged segment can reap great rewards.

Moreover, advertisers who utilize data to understand the behavior of their target audience across other categories can identify engagement and/or conversion opportunities. For female sports audiences specifically, the data reveals that they are also far more likely to visit specific product categories than their male counterparts. For example, compared with the male FIFA audience, the female FIFA audience in 2018 was 327% more likely to visit an online fragrance or cosmetic shop, 91% more likely to visit an online health and wellbeing store and 53% more likely to visit an online store selling apparel.

What does this mean to advertisers and brands?
Using readily available data from Comscore reveals that female sports audiences present advertisers and brands with a highly engaged target across categories. Limiting focus to male audiences would mean missing out on this great opportunity to leverage the greater engagement of female sports audiences.

This blog post provides just a snippet of the insights around this topic. Read the full report now to learn more about why advertisers should be leveraging female sports audiences and exploring the other common truisms in the media and advertising industry.